The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto

Abstract

In September 394, seven monks set out from their monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem and began making their way to Egypt, where they would spend the next several months visiting an array of monastic celebrities, from the Thebaid in the south to the delta town of Diolcos in the north. Not long after their return, one of them anonymously composed in Greek a lively hagiographic account of their experiences and entitled it “Inquiry about the Monks of Egypt,” though it typically is referred to by modern scholars as Historia monachorum in Aegypto, the title of Rufinus of Aquileia’s Latin translation of the Greek original. The Greek Historia monachorum was one of the most widely read and disseminated Greek hagiographic texts during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. To this day it remains, alongside Athanasius’ Life of Antony, one of the core primary sources for fourth-century Egyptian monasticism as well as one of the most fascinating, yet perplexing, pieces of monastic hagiography to survive from the entire patristic period. However, until now it has not received the intensive and sustained scholarly analysis that a monograph affords. In this book, the first of its kind in any language, Cain incorporates insights from source criticism, stylistic and rhetorical analysis, literary criticism, and historical, geographical, and theological studies in an attempt to break new ground and revise current scholarly orthodoxy about a broad range of interpretive issues and problems.

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